


An Understanding

by jujubiest



Series: PoI Ficlets [7]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Episode: s03e13 4C, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-11
Updated: 2014-11-11
Packaged: 2018-02-25 00:33:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2602070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John had already made up his mind to go back to New York with Harold, so the phone call wasn't really necessary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Understanding

**Author's Note:**

> One of the two tiny ficlets I've written while trying to figure out how to make the next chapter of Auditory Voyeurism work.

John had already made up his mind to go back to New York with Harold, assuming Harold still wanted him after that outburst on the plane, which he intended to find out about as soon as he figured out a way to pose the question. So the phone call wasn’t really necessary.

The Machine, though, kept its own counsel now regarding what was and wasn’t necessary. His cell phone started ringing as he was leaving the building. Unknown Caller. He sighed, hit Answer, and lifted it to his ear.

“Can…you…hear…me?”

The robotic voice sent an unpleasant chill through him. He remembered standing in the near-darkness in a phone booth, aiming and squeezing the trigger over and over, blindly trusting because he had no other choice. It was not a feeling he cared to repeat ever again.

“Yes,” he said softly. “What do you want?”

“Detective Joss Carter,” and John’s hand clenched involuntarily on the phone, because it wasn’t a mechanical voice this time. It was Carter’s own; he recognized it from her work phone’s voicemail message. He closed his eyes against a wave of pain and resisted the urge to just drop the damn phone and crush it beneath the heel of his shoe.

“What about her,” he rasped out. It was ridiculous to be angry at a machine. It wasn’t a person. It couldn’t care.

 _Can’t it?_ A voice whispered in the back of his mind, sounding suspiciously like Root. _Do you really believe it doesn’t feel anything, John? Is that why you blackmailed it with the deaths of hundreds in order to make it help you find Harold when he was taken from you?_

“I’m…sorry,” the voice said, reverting to its eerie hodgepodge of recorded voice clips. “She…”

It paused, and this was ridiculous. Stupid. A machine didn’t pause, at a loss for words. A machine didn’t call to apologize for not saving a friend.

“She…” it started up again. “Was...”

“What,” he growled into the phone. “What? Spit it out. What was she? Please explain it to me, because I’m having a hard time understanding. Was she collateral damage? Not important enough? Not a priority? Not something you could see in time? She was my _friend_. She was the best of us. And you let her die.”

The silence stretched in his ear as Reese clutched the phone, hand trembling, trying to get his anger under control. He wanted to break something. He wanted to _destroy_ something.

It was his imagination. It had to be. When the voice spoke again, it was Reese’s own humanity that ascribed a soft sadness to the way the words filtered through the phone. Machines don’t feel pain, they can’t. The machine couldn’t possibly know how to care that Joss was gone.

“Not…irrelevant.” The voice says, haltingly. “She…was…not…irrelevant…to…me.”

John jerked the phone away from his ear, staring down at the screen, face stricken. The camera light was on.

“You’re damn right, she wasn’t,” he said softly. “And I won’t do this again. Harold…Shaw…Lionel…hell, even Root. Shaw seems to like her. I’m not losing anyone else. I can’t. You want me back on board with your mission, you need to make them a priority. If you let it happen again, I’m done. I’ll check out of this whole damn existence before I let you rope me back in. Understand?”

The blinking light went dark, but the call stayed on. John waited a beat, then tentatively held the receiver against his ear.

“I…understand,” the voice intoned after a pause. The call ended.


End file.
